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Re: Eliminating full stops in 'am'/'pm'

Which do you prefer - set 1 or 2? Are all four examples technically correct?

Set 1
At 10.05am, Paul was acquitted.
At 10am, Paul was acquitted.

Set 2
At 10:05 am, Paul was acquitted.
At 10 am, Paul was acquitted.

Thanks

Personally, I never use full stops, and just write am/pm. Other people will tell you that they always use them. As with many other things, it's a question of style for a lot of people and some publications will demand their use or their omission.

I'm not sure why you've put them in those two sets. I can't see a connection between them. Putting a space before "am" in Set 2 doesn't explain why you have used "10:05" instead of "10.05". I used to see the colon used quite regularly when I travelled to continental Europe. It was used, for example, on the departures board for the Eurostar trains and I saw it again recently at a train station in Spain. We don't often use the colon in standard BrE writing though.

I would write "At 10.05am, Paul was acquitted" and "At 10am, Paul was acquitted".

Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.